-Frank
Sinatra, who clearly was not referring to China when he sang these words in
“New York, New York”.

There was once an impatient farmer who couldn't wait for his
crops to grow. So each morning he would go to the fields and pull on his
crops in an effort to get them to grow faster. In time the plants died
before reaching maturity, leading us all to this inescapable moral: Do not try
to change the natural pace of things. Everything happens in its own time, at
its own pace.

This Ancient Chinese Parable holds true for many things in life,
from project management to growing a business, raising children, personal
growth,
working a bureaucracy, or even getting your DSL service installed in your
Beijing apartment. While
this should be no surprise to anyone (including me), the experience I had
getting high-speed internet access to work demonstrated some unique things about
Chinese culture that I think are worth writing about.

The waiting list for getting DSL installed in your room in
China is about one month, but two weeks into this waiting period I got a knock
at the door at 7:00 PM. Two technicians from China Telecomm were there to
install and test the hardware! Huzzah! Now I can make backups of my
pictures routinely and stay in touch with the world on a regular
basis!

Just one problem: when they installed the driver software,
my laptop got trashed. I mean completely trashed. A good
chunk of the c:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory was missing, along with some essential
programs like HIMEM.SYS and WIN.COM, so Windows wouldn't boot at all. And
since my laptop had no CD-ROM or floppy drive, I knew instantly that the laptop
would have to go back to Sony to restore these essential system files. It
took two computer experts from China Telecom (quickly dispatched once the
problem occurred) until 10:30 that night to reach the same conclusion on their
own.

If
this had happened in America, the story might have ended there, and the
technicians would have shrugged their shoulders and left, noting how late it was
getting. (American communication companies tend to be very adamant about
NOT wanting to touch your computer for fear of getting bogged down in these
kinds of problems. They install the equipment, verify that the green light
is on, hand you a CD-ROM with installation software, and leave in a huff.)
China Telecomm, however, took total responsibility. The next day they had
a car waiting for me, my translator, and my laptop, and took us directly to
Sony's Beijing repair facility to have the laptop fixed. The Sony
technicians (all wearing Sony uniforms -- China is very big on uniforms)
were expecting us and took us all in to the back room, bypassing the long lines
at the reception desk.

Thankfully, my predictions about Sony having the right
equipment proved true. Just one problem: "We don't have the English
version of the Restoration CD-ROM here". AAAUUUGGGHHH!!! My
pictures were on that laptop! My emails and addresses were on that
laptop! My student's grades and attendance records were on that
laptop! They wanted to reformat the hard disk and re-install Windows,
wiping out all of my files and several thousand dollars worth of commercial
applications!

I had a better idea, but it would take longer to do.
Working together, we started restoring only select files and directories first,
and seeing what happened. The Sony technicians, like the China Telecomm
technicians, were extremely competent and patient. Evening came and the
restoration was still not completed, so we agreed that they would continue to
work on it this way while I tried to get a copy of the restoration CD, just in
case.

A week later I had my CD, and Sony had finished the
restoration on their own. The
files had been saved, the but the applications had to be reinstalled.
GREAT!! CT took me back to Sony to pick it up. Just one problem...

No Tickee, No Shirtee

"Where's your receipt?" they asked when I got
there. Oh, no! I had left it at my apartment, but I didn't think it
would be a problem. After all, I had made friends with all the technicians
and the front counter staff the week before. Everyone there knew me; they
all knew the laptop was mine, so there should have been no problem! Wrong
thought.

"You know the laptop is mine,
right?"

"Of course!"

"So isn't that what the receipt is for -- to prove
to you that something is mine?"

"You must have your receipt! Without receipt,
you cannot take it home."

"What if it was destroyed in a fire? What if
my dog ate it? What would happen then?"

I was stared at with incredulousness. It was as if I
had asked "But what if the sun goes nova?" - an
obscure hypothetical circumstance that would never happen in real life.
People in China are responsible; if they want their laptops back then they make
sure that their receipts do not get lost. Or maybe they just bribe
somebody. I don't know.

I didn't have a spare afternoon until a week later, at
which time CT drove me (with my receipt!) to Sony, installed the software there
and made sure it worked this time, drove me back, and hooked up the laptop to the DSL
connection. Just one problem...

"Don't you want to test it before you leave?"

"Can't test", came the response.
"No password".

I'll fast-forward over the rest: the password could not be
dispensed until one week after the paperwork had been signed that the hardware
was installed and working. They could not call in and ask for the
password, claiming an unusual circumstance, for I have learned that their
gluttony of rules do not allow for exception handling. Once the week had
passed, someone had to go to the phone company office in person to get the
password, for it was considered secret and personal information and it would be
a privacy violation to communicate it any other way.

Okay,
so now everything is installed and working. And it only took a hare less
than three months! I can now back up all of my pictures to another server
around the clock (I have to; my laptop is quickly running out of space!).
Although the speed of the connection is slower than dialup most of the
time, I have no complaints. You'll understand why after my next story...

Dear
Pen Pal,

I've always thought that the Internet should be used to
bring people together, and I had this great idea that writing a letter to a real
person (as opposed to writing for Yet Another Boring School Assignment of No
Consequence) might carry more weight, and make the students take it just a
little more seriously. So I paired up "email buddies" between my
students at the Chemical Engineering School, and Mrs. Clapkin's 5th grade
classroom at Calvert Street Elementary School in Woodland Hills, California (who
have been following this travelogue since the beginning). Students on both
sides of the pond were very excited when the project first began, and indeed
reading and writing these letters became "top of mind" for many of
them. They could not wait to begin!!

But although everyone here plays computer games in their
spare time, accessing the Internet in China is still very tough. And
getting access TO computers WITH Internet access is the toughest of all.
Just like it was in America 20 years ago, all the computers here are in locked
rooms and their access is rationed. Sometimes two or three weeks might
pass by before my students could be squeezed in be allowed to access their
emails, making for very disjointed conversations. Worst of all was when we
receive access on a Friday afternoon, for as the afternoon wears on the traffic
on the Internet (not just in the school, but throughout all of China!) gets so
heavy that by 4:30 nothing can come in or out. We are as good as
disconnected. Many students would take more than an hour to compose and
spell-check their email, and then when they hit 'send', the Yahoo(!) page comes
up with a nondescript error - and they would have to start all over again!
Very discouraging. Last week's session saw only two students able to get
their emails out in time. (Sigh!)

The Internet Here is Different

We have all heard stories about how China
routinely censors the Internet. Although it's sometimes difficult to tell
the difference between a slow server, a "traffic jam" and intentional
blocking, I can tell you that on two occasions I witnessed pretty bizarre
behavior and was able to certify that it was, indeed, government-backed
intervention. Now I know most of you don't want to read a bunch of
techno-babble (I think I've written too much of that already in this chapter!),
so at the risk of oversimplifying everything, allow me to present two analogous
scenarios which should help explain what's going on.

Scenario #1:

“Hi. Someone I trusted told
me you sell newspapers here. Can you give
me a copy of the New York Times?"

In the internet world this is called
"Web Site Hijacking". Someone types in a website (like www.google.com),
and someone else
goes to a lot of trouble to make sure that request gets re-routed to
another server - somebody else's server. Through tests that I
won't bother going into, I was able to verify on two separate occasions that
the requests were being routed to a server run by the Chinese government. For
two days Google and Yahoo! were redirected in this way; many other sites are
simply blocked (which requires a lot less work on their part). Examples of sites that
are blocked all the time are geocities.com and
time.com (the US News magazine); also two of my other websites (www.DataEgg.org and NotYourOrdinary.com) which I
have verified can be seen in the U.S. but not from here. I can't imagine that my websites
would offend government officials; nor can I imagine how useful it is to
block entire search engines intermittently.

Okay, here's the second scenario:

"Welcome to Bank of the Internet,
sir. How may I help you?

"I'd like to withdraw some money from my account,
please."

"I'm sorry; sir, we’ve had a rash of bank
thefts recently, so to put a stop to it we’re denying access to everyone."

“But I’m a paying customer!”

"That’s not our problem, sir.I would advise you to switch police forces, since the one
you’re subscribing to obviously isn’t able to stop these abuses from
occurring.”

Sound
ridiculous? Not in the world of Internet! "The Bank" in
this case is the company that hosts my email server. Since there has been
a lot of subversive activity emanating from China and Thailand, and since it's
too much trouble for them to decide who's legit and who's not, they have
decided to block access to ALL IP addresses that come from those
countries, insisting that those Internet Service Providers have all the incentive
in the world to police and terminate their paying customers. "If
you're still having a problem, we advise you to switch Internet
Service Providers, since the one you're using now is obviously too lazy to
enforce the rules that we have pushed onto them." (My ISP is provided
by the school; it's not like I have a great many choices here!)

Meet
the Students

I'd like to take a moment and offer my
sincere thanks, gratitude, and full credit for this idea to my good friend (and
outstanding web and graphic designer) Bonnie Felt, who was also responsible for convincing me to write this
weblog in the first place.

My Life

by Chen Xiao Jing ("Mary")

"If let me say that what does my
{day / week / year} life like, I can describe them in one word:

My day life like sugar water;

My week life like pure water;

My year life like bitter coffee.

Maybe someone asks me why I say that;

When I understand how to live, I find
that everyday is interesting and now. I could arrange my life very
rich. I often get up at 7:00, then have breakfast: bread and milk or egg
and milk. About 8:00, I go to school. I can communicate with my
friends and say anything. I can play computer to know more things.
Until at 11:50, I have lunch. After that go back classroom to watch
TV. At 1:30, I continue studying. But I finish my class at
3:10. After class, I could play with my good friends, such as, go
shopping, skating, play badminton. I can say that this is my day
life. Although, I don't have special day I feel it very rich. In a
word, my day life is like sugar water.

If you always do the same thing, you
must feel boring. I find that I always do the same thing during week, so I
think my week life like pure water.

Only one week, I have felt bored.
If you do the same thing in a year, what's your feeling? What do you
think? I think you feel very aridity so I use bitter coffee describe my
year life.